


small angry gods

by silklace



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-11 00:15:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15303222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silklace/pseuds/silklace
Summary: Jon keeps getting sent back in time.





	small angry gods

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE, for the love of our collective sanity, keep it secret, keep it safe: do not show to anyone directly or indirectly involved.

He jerks awake to the feeling of the ground rushing underneath him.

Maybe awake isn’t the right word. It’s more like he is and then he isn’t and then – he is, again.

Instinct – or familiarity – kicks in, and he grabs the first thing he can reach which, thankfully, turns out to be a steel pole and not the back of someone’s head. He does, however, manage to stumble backwards, trodding on someone’s foot. He mumbles an apology, ducking his head low, trying not to make eye contact. Goddamnit. The fucking subway.

He hates when it’s a crowded place. It’s disorienting enough as it is, never mind having to make sure he’s not destroying the space-time continuum by blinking into existence on his past self’s lap in the middle of DC.

Granted, he’d gotten good enough at his poker face at that point in his political career that his younger self probably would have calmly accepted it, gotten off at the next stop, and not entirely lost his shit until he’d been able to corner Tommy in the nearest locked office and ask him what the hell kind of Area 52 secrets he’s been keeping from them, but still.

All around it’s easier when he gets violently knocked backward in space and time and lands in a nice, deserted alleyway, or the unoccupied bathroom stall of a coffee shop. Even the broom closet in the EEOB had been kind of peaceful until -

He shoves that thought away and instead gets off at the next stop when the doors slide open. Then, he starts winding his way towards his destination.

It’s the same place – he corrects himself. It’s the same person every time, and if that’s not on the nose enough, he doesn’t know what is.

It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what was happening, because when your destination is a person and not a place, there’s not a lot of point in navel-gazing about how maybe he’d been chosen to do something big, to rewrite history, to stop Trump or some other disaster from happening.

He also knows because he’d tested it once, early on, when he thought maybe he was having a true, full-on nervous breakdown – tested what would happen if he just took off in the other direction, booked it to the airport, the train station, the nearest rental car place, and got himself as far as possible from the one person he couldn’t stop orbiting around.

It hadn’t worked. He’d snapped back and forth between times like a fucking elastic pulled too tightly until he lost count, and then until he was sick, throwing up in the bathroom back at Crooked Media while Lovett – his Lovett - knocked on the door and asked if the burritos at lunch hadn’t sat with him well, and he was feeling a little off too, himself, and maybe it was the margarita they’d split, and had Jon turned into a _total_ lightweight in his old age, and okay he’d get him some water.

Lovett had let himself in when he’d returned and passed the glass to Jon with delicate fingertips.

“I’m not old,” Jon had said weakly, pressing the glass to his forehead. Lovett had his arm crossed over his chest like he wanted to bolt and was regretting coming into a bathroom that smelled like vomit.

“Tell that to the gray in your hair,” he’d quipped back, not his best barb, but still. It had made Jon smile.

He’d meant to try, gamely, once more the next time it happened. And it would. By then it was a pattern - some casual time travel every couple of days, happening without any real kind of warning, except that it was more common when he was sleepy or stressed or sitting quietly with Lovett at the end of a long week watching him play video games, the dogs stretched across their laps.

It’d been early morning, too early really, with the mist still heavy and low and not yet burned off by the sun. He’d watched Leo snuffling along in the grass, debating if he should crawl back into bed for another hour before he had to face Twitter or force himself to go for a run. The thought of crawling back into his warm bed, sliding between the slightly cooled sheets, maybe running a hand down his belly and between his legs was – really appealing.

And yet, if he went for a run now, he’d have time to get Lovett up for a Starbucks drive-through before they went in for an early morning meeting with one of their east coast advertisers.

He’d decided on the run.

When he got back, he had sweat pooling in the small of his back, under his arms. Lovett was in the front yard – wearing. God. Jon looked away, then forced himself to jog over, squinting a little in the early, bright sunlight.

“You realize people can see you,” he said, by way of greeting. He bent down and rubbed Pundit’s ears.

Lovett looked supremely unimpressed. “And you realize that you’re a bad dog dad, don’t you? Leo would love a morning run, Jon. He’s pining in the window for you.” He nodded to Jon’s front door, where Leo was stood up on his hind legs, giving Jon the hundred yard stare.

Jon shuffled guiltily. “He always needs to be carried by the end! And hey, I was the one up at 6 taking him out to pee, okay? So – you know, cool your jets.”

Lovett had still looked half-asleep, faint pillow creases on one side of his face. “Pundit enjoys a nice morning cuddle,” he’d said balefully and Jon had – had tried not to imagine it, except –

He could – could imagine it so easily. Lovett sleepy and pink-cheeked and somehow more pliable, amenable to being rolled on to his belly so Jon could bite softly at the back of his neck, could rub his morning hard-on against the swell of his ass, could listen to him complain about it being too early, or too bright, or too hot, even as he pushed his hips up and back for it, for the slow, easy slide of Jon’s fat dick against the line of his ass…

Jon cleared his throat. Lovett was leaning down towards the grass, one hand wrapped in an inside-out poop bag.

“Right,” Jon said, backing away. “Listen – Starbucks run in 45? I just gotta,” he swallowed.

Lovett was squinting up at him, clearly only half-listening, the other half of his brain concentrating on picking up Pundit’s dog shit. He was squatting, so that Jon could see the broad stretch of his shoulders through his thin t-shirt, the muscled curve of his thighs under his distractingly short boxer briefs – and Jon. Jon had been there in that moment a hundred, a thousand times before: Lovett half-focused on some task and half of his attention on Jon, always on Jon, because as much as Jon was always keeping one eye on Lovett –

Lovett was always looking back.

He’d blinked and found himself in the corner of a coffee shop in DC. Fuck. Fucking –

At a table near the window, a curly head was bent forward over a laptop. One leg was curled up under him and the other was propped up on a nearby chair.

Jon couldn’t see his expression but – he knew the slant of those shoulders, the way they hitched up closer and closer to his ears as he neared a deadline.

It was one of those things you just picked up, working so close with someone, Jon had told himself. He was sure he could recognize Cody by the small patch of brown skin on the back of his neck, too.

He’d slumped lower at his table, twitching the stand-up menu so that it more fully blocked his face, but it was useless, really – if Lovett turned around for any reason, or decided he needed to use the restroom or wanted another latte with two shots of espresso, whipped cream, and chocolate shavings – he would see Jon.

Every time Jon tried to imagine what Lovett would do if he saw him – this Lovett, who Jon has now had a chance to observe from every possible distance and who is oddly smaller than Jon thought he remembered, his face thin and still boyish; his hair shorn close to his head in some approximation of a professional haircut; who fidgets when people aren’t looking and then holds himself in careful stillness when they are – he can’t. He’d tried – and he just couldn’t.

Luckily, that hadn’t been the day he was going to find out because someone had come in that had immediately absorbed all of Lovett’s attention.

He’d looked up at the sound of the bell tinkling, the corner of his mouth twitching into a smile which he quickly swallowed, then looked down and continued to work, and then Jon had watched himself – younger, a little thicker in the chest and hips, and sporting a buzz-cut – clap Lovett on the shoulder and pull the chair he’d been using to kick his feet up on out from under him, plopping down into it while Lovett made an aggrieved sound.

Jon couldn’t hear what they were saying from his perch – his stalker perch, he thought, woundedly – in the corner of the coffee shop but he could imagine. This was the coffee shop Lovett used to escape to when he was behind on a deadline, and Jon would let him go for five or six hours before tracking him down at the end of the day to ostensibly check in about the progress of the speech, but which he was sure always came across as transparently as what it was – that he’d missed Lovett and wanted to see him.

Watching himself, now, though - it's. It’s possible he misjudged the level of his transparency.

He – well, past him - keeps checking his watch, and while Lovett doesn’t miss a beat, hands flying wildly as he explains something in detail to him, he blinks and licks his lips each time Jon does it.

“What the fuck are you doing,” Jon muttered, feeling sick with stupidity as his younger self gave a once-over to a leggy blond woman crossing in front of their table. Lovett was biting his lip, studiously and intently checking something on his laptop, and when Jon looked away from the woman and gave him a lopsided, rueful smile he pretended not to have noticed the whole thing.

 _You’re an idiot,_ he thought, as he watched himself rise from the table a few minutes later, clapping Lovett on the shoulder again like they were at a fucking ball game and sliding his aviators up his nose. Lovett was smiling, though, and he didn’t stop smiling when Jon walked away, and he didn’t stop watching him until he was out of sight, and it was only after Jon had been gone for several long moments that Lovett shook himself, biting the inside of his cheek and palming the back of his neck, and forced himself to get back to work.

_The biggest idiot in the world._

Jon stood up without realizing it, only with a half-formed, full-crazy thought in his brain that he wanted to – to talk to Lovett, to tell him – but he blinked, sucked in a breath, and found himself in the studio, watching Tommy read ad copy while Lovett harassed him about “guiding pulses” and “switching sides.”

That was the worst part – well, aside from being forced to confront that he’d been in love with one of his best friends for almost a decade, and the existential-crisis inducing revelation that time travel was real, and also the disappointing realization that traveling through space and time via magic or whatever the hell this was made him just as sick as when he did it on a plane– but that it was also, slowly, accumulatively, stealing time from him.

Hours that he couldn’t ever get back, that were just – gone.

He didn’t disappear or blink out of existence or anything noticeable when he went back in time; instead he seemed to go on as usual in some sort of auto-pilot consciousness. It wasn’t even fair to call it auto-pilot, though, because no one ever noticed or mentioned that he was acting differently than usual, and while maybe he could expect that from some people, he trusted Tommy, and Dan, and Lovett too much to expect that they wouldn’t notice - and in Lovett’s case, loudly call him out on it - if he periodically became a robot-shell of himself for a couple of hours every week. It didn’t – didn’t even occur to him that that was a possibility.

He slotted back in seamlessly and in time to join in and let the listeners know that Tommy was flushed red from forehead to chin, to blink and smile down at his iPad at Lovett’s approving look. When they were done recording, he excused himself for the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and told himself that next time – next time, he was going to jump.

+++

Now, he watches the subway train speeding off ahead of him and makes his way out into the cool night air. It’s late, but he knows where he is. Lovett’s townhouse is a couple of blocks away.

He bobs between the groups of late-night bar goers and couples on dates. He feels – oddly calm. Resolved, now that he’s decided he’s going to do this, like it’s out of his hands what happens next.

It occurs to him that Lovett might be out – but probably not, since he usually gets dropped in his close proximity, since the instinct part of him that orbits towards Lovett even more so with this time-travel thing is pointing him towards his place. What’s more likely is that the others – Tommy and Cody and Mike – are also home and he’ll have to fucking throw pebbles at Lovett’s window. Or stand outside with a boombox on his shoulders.

It’s possible he feels less calm than he originally imagined.

Still, he’s lucky, because when he rounds the corner to the townhouse, he sees that all of the lights are still out like no one’s home, except - except the front lamp, which sheds a warm circle of light over two people standing close together on the front steps.

He pulls back behind a hedge, feeling like a stalker, (because you are one, he thinks wildly) but he’s not sure his psyche – then or now – can handle a confrontation with himself. Because that’s who's up on the steps with Lovett right now, leaning in close and a little drunkenly as Lovett gesticulates wildly, his face pink and vibrant and alive.

Watching Lovett, Jon thinks: you would have to be very, very stupid not to realize he’s in love with you.

Or, he thinks unhappily, very scared.

He hears his own braying laugh filter around the corner, and can imagine the way Lovett would be pleased and trying - badly - to hide it.

He sidles closer to hear and gets a branch dangerously close to his eye, but he can make out Lovett saying, “I know it’s late, and you probably have to be up super early to work or go for a run or help little old ladies cross the street –,” he pauses to let Jon giggle, and then, taking a breath, says, “But, uh, my dad sent me some whiskey to congratulate me on the latest speech, which is, you know, very nice even though I don’t drink whiskey but I know you do, so-”

He winces, remembering what comes next. He’d – in his memory of this night, which was admittedly a little hazy because Tommy had kept pushing vodka sodas at him, and he hadn’t had much to eat that day, and it was hot in the bar, and he’d felt swimmy and relieved to have a free night after what had been a very long and very bad week, and he was a little turned on with all the bodies brushing against him, and Lovett had kept disappearing and then reappearing at his elbow (like he couldn’t keep himself away, he thinks now), but still – he’d been the one to lean back against the bar where Lovett was talking with someone – a dark-haired, thin guy that Jon vaguely recognized – and tilt sideways to say hotly in Lovett’s ear, “I need some air.”

Lovett had turned mid-conversation and given him a flat look, saying, “It’s all around you,” but when Jon had – god, had whined and said, “Cold air. Fresh air,” Lovett had nodded, paid his tab, and followed Jon out, even while Tommy and Cody had tried to needle them to stay a little longer. Lovett hadn’t even said goodbye to the guy at the bar, even though he had mentioned the other week that he was sorely in need of a hook-up, that it had been ages –

Outside, Jon had looped his arm around Lovett’s neck, and thought Lovett must really feel bad for him if he was tolerating that kind of touch.

So, it was – it was Jon who had been the needy one, who had wanted Lovett’s attention, who had stolen him away from a hook-up because he was tired and drunk and restless, and when Lovett had offered him the drink, he remembers thinking very clearly, out of the otherwise hazy, alcohol-tinged stupor of his brain – that Lovett was a really good friend, to offer him a pity drink when probably he just wanted to go jerk off and go to bed, and that if Jon was going to be as good a friend, he would say no and let Lovett get to sleep without Jon bothering him anymore.

“Nah,” he hears himself saying. “I should hit the hay. Gotta be up early for those little old ladies,” he jokes, even though – it’s not that funny.

There’s a pause and then Lovett says, “They are – they are relentless, it’s true.”

He remembers this part, too, how Lovett had been smiling. How he’d been looking down at the keys in his hand, the whole time.

“Night, Lo.”

Jon pushes back against the hedge as he hears footsteps on the stairs and is belatedly grateful that his younger self lives in the direction of the opposite corner. He waits until he’s out of sight, then takes a deep breath and pushes forward.

“Forget someth -,” Lovett’s voice sounds strained but cheerful as he turns back around. Then, something complicated happens as Jon comes into the light – Lovett’s eyes go wide, then wider, and his mouth drops open.

“Listen,” Jon says, wishing – how could he not have prepared a better speech for this?

“What the fuck,” Lovett says, softly, as if he’s talking to himself.

“I know this is weird,” Jon says, hands up.

“Am I hallucinating? Am I dying? Oh my god.” Lovett takes a step back, so that his foot hits the threshold of the door. “I’m having a psychotic break.”

“You’re fine, just listen to me for - ”

“They say stress will do that to you – ”

“- no – no, you’re not -”

“ - and like, I _know_ that I’ve been a little stressed lately - ”

“We – we all have! It’s – you’re perfectly normal.” Jon shakes his head. “That’s not the point –”

“- but, I didn’t think I was _this_ stressed. I gotta –

“ - can you listen to me? Like, _can_ you – is that in your repertoire of responses, right now – “

“I gotta take a vacation. I gotta tell Obama I need to take a vacation.”

“Oh my god, can you calm down for a minute?” Jon definitely should have prepared a better speech for this.

“How am I going to tell Obama that I had a hallucination and now I need to go sit on a white beach and have men in flowered sarongs fan me with palm fronds?”

Jon feels a little hysterical. “You don’t -,” he grits his teeth. “ _I_ can fan with you palm fronds, okay?”

“Oh, good,” Lovett says faintly. “Now I know this is a product of my fevered imagination.”

He sits down abruptly on the lip of the door. Jon kneels with him.

“Don’t – don’t do that,” Lovett says, glaring. “I’m not – I’m not a child.”

Jon puts his hands up, palms out, again. “If I try to explain, will you listen?”

Lovett looks at him for a minute, then says, softly. “You have – you have salt and pepper in your hair, at your – at your temples.” He sounds, a little bit, like he wants to cry.

“That’s – actually a really good segue,” Jon gets out. “I’m from the future. Wow, that sounds. So bad.” He topples back on his ass to sit, because his knees are starting to hurt a little, and he feels like this conversation might take longer than a minute. He really hopes Tommy and Cody aren’t going to come home anytime soon.

He explains, as best he can, with as few words as possible. Messaging, he thinks, a little wildly.

By the time he’s done, Lovett’s mouth is still open a little, but his eyes are no longer wide. Instead, they’ve narrowed assessingly. “What if I don’t believe you?” He says, and Jon’s heart sinks. “What if you’re – what if Jon – or or someone else – is playing an elaborate – you could be his uncle, for all I know! A distant cousin! That he’s never mentioned.”

Jon doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t know what to say. He nods, looking at his knees and trying to think.

He hears Lovett say faintly, “Oh, fuck. Fuck. It is you.”

Lovett pulls himself to his feet, a little wobbily, and Jon remembers that he’s been drinking half the night. “I need – I need a minute. This is – this is.” He laughs, voice strained and thin, and fumbles with the keys again. “I need a drink? Or a lot of drugs. Like a shit ton of drugs.”

He looks over his shoulder, resting the side of his head against the door. The combination of life-changing news and a steady supply of Miller Lites for the past couple of hours seem to have finally hit him. “Don’t judge me for that, you’re all old and wise and probably drug-free, now, but you know. Some of us are still – it’s still developmentally appropriate for me to be interested in drugs, okay?”

Jon wants to touch the soft curve of his arm, to fix the back of his shirt where his tag is sticking out. Instead, he says, “I don’t think it’s ever really like, a recommended developmental stage.”

Lovett looks distinctly unimpressed with that comment, turning away to get the door finally open. Jon moves to follow him inside and comes up short when Lovett plants his hand on the door frame, barring him. “If this is -,” he bites the inside of his cheek. “Look. Prove it. Tell me something only someone from the future would know.”

“In six months, you’re going to move to L.A.,” Jon says, without missing a beat.

Lovett inhales sharply, like he’d been expecting something else. He slits his eyes. “You could have – you might have overheard me talking about it.”

“You haven’t told anyone. You’re not going to tell anyone for another 4 months.”

“I – there was a phone call,” Lovett says, like he’s trying to hold on to something that’s slipping from his grasp. “I was stupid, and I took a phone call from someone in L.A. while I was at work, and Jon could have heard me, and - ”

“He didn’t,” Jon says, which is true, and also because he doesn’t want to say, but _I_ heard you, because I was sitting in a broom closet when I should have been watching re-runs of Frasier with you in your living room in WeHo, and instead was listening to the high, excited tone of your voice as you got offered a writing job, and then, after you’d ended the call, the low muffled sound of you crying, slumped against the wall of a deserted, rarely used hallway.

Instead, Jon says, gently, “He doesn’t know.”

Lovett’s hand drops to his side. “This is really fucked up,” he says, accusingly, and lets Jon follow him inside.

+++

Upstairs, Lovett drops to his bed, the handle of vodka he’d grabbed from the freezer bumping gently against his hip. He’d stopped in the kitchen long enough to grab it and then said, a little bleakly, “Come upstairs, there’s no way I’m explaining this to the others.”

Jon hovers, not knowing what to do with his hands.

“So,” Lovett says lightly, scootching up the bed until his back’s against the headboard. He grabs the bottle of vodka and unscrews it, taking a swig. “I’d offer you some, but I – don’t want to.”

Jon shrugs. He hasn’t tested what substances do to time-travel and he’s not exactly eager to find out. Plus, if it helps Lovett feel a little more in control of the situation, he’s not going to deny him that.

He sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. “So.”

Lovett swallows and looks thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “I know this genre. Which you know, that I know. Jesus. Anyways, point being – this is like, standard sci-fi shit. So, why were you chosen? What have you been sent back in time to stop from happening? What life-altering, history-shattering event is it your destiny to prevent?”

“Uh,” Jon says, carefully.

“If you – if you for one second are even seriously considering saying to me, to my face, that if you tell me, you’ll have to kill me, I’m kicking you out. I know I look small, but I come from – I come from hearty stock, you -”

Jon’s laughing, which is probably not the response Lovett was going for but he is, and it feels good. Normal. Familiar. He gets out, “I wasn’t going to say that.”

Lovett’s ability to look pleased at a joke transcends even very stressful situations. Jon wonders if that preening pink flush goes all the way down to his belly, then feels ashamed of himself.

Lovett takes another swig from the bottle before he screws the cap back on. “Really though,” he says, a little cajoling. A look crosses his face and he sits up, ramrod straight. “Oh my god,” he breathes, “Is it – Obama? Is Obama getting assassinated?”

“No,” Jon says quickly. “God – no.”

“Thank god,” Lovett says, slumping back. “That would destroy Jon.” He blinks up at the ceiling. “Well, you. This is weird.” He takes a small, deep breath. “It would be very upsetting for me, as well,” he clarifies. “And – Tommy, I’m sure. All of us, really. I’m not sure – Jon is just. He just came to my mind first, is all.” He shrugs.

“Right,” Jon says.

Lovett pulls himself up, again. “So, what is it?” He touches his feet together, so that his legs make a diamond shape, and picks at a loose thread on the comforter. “Must be big.”

Jon stands up. He palms the back of his neck, looking around. Lovett’s room is a mess, which isn’t surprising, but there’s all these little details that he doesn’t know about. He’d never – Lovett had never taken him into his bedroom, before.

“What is it,” Lovett asks again, in that needling voice, like he wants you to know he’s prepared to keep asking until he gets an answer and being perceived as annoying isn’t going to stop him, and in fact realistically only fuels him.

“I think.” Jon blows out a breath. “I think I have to tell you something.”

Lovett’s brow furrows. “That’s…weird,” he says, finally. Then, in a smaller voice, “I am – am I dying?”

“No! God,” Jon says, teeth hurting just thinking about that. “You’re awfully preoccupied with your own death, you know, Jesus.”

“Oh, excuse me,” Lovett says, aggrieved. “Pretty sure that time travel is – that someone showing up from the fucking future is, you know, conceivably, a harbinger of your own death, so, excuse me, for being a little – a little on fucking edge.”

“I’m sorry,” Jon apologizes, running his hands against his scalp. “I’m sorry, you’re right.”

“Well, I know _that_ ,” Lovett says, but he sounds a little soothed.

They’re quiet for a minute. Jon notices that there’s a small bottle of lube on Lovett’s nightstand, and he looks away from it, flushing.

Finally, Lovett says, in a purposefully even voice, “Well, if you have something to tell me, why don’t you just say it. I mean – not to _me_ me. To future me. Your – the version of me that is in the future. And - not dead, as we've established.”

Lovett’s sprawled out on the bed, looking at Jon casually, but there’s something tense in the line of his hips, his shoulders, his spine that only loosens up when Jon says, “I _tried_ , and every time – every time I so much as even thought about it, I got snapped back here, to DC.” He doesn’t add, “Also, you’re a serial short-term relationshipper, and there’s never seemed to be the right time,” because that probably doesn’t really cut it, at this point, and also he’s not – he’s not ready. Not yet.

“ _Back_ to DC?” Lovett says quickly.

“Yeah, yeah – from LA,” Jon explains. He shrugs. “I don’t know why it has to be here, now, either.”

Lovett’s nodding, like all of this checks out, but he says, a little breathless, “We’re in – we’re in LA together, then?”

“Yeah.” Jon can’t stop himself from smiling. “All of us – Tommy and Dan, too. I probably – actually shouldn’t say too much more than that, doesn’t seem like – that seems like it’s against the rules, in these sorts of situations.”

Lovett lets out a breathless, relieved kind of laugh. “God,” he says. “Well, things really worked out for everyone, huh – what, I’m sure, I’m sure you and Tommy and Dan all have beautiful, LA actress wives, and – and book deals, and speaking gigs. That’s – that’s really good.”

Jon’s brow furrows. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “I don’t – I’m not married, though,” he clarifies. “Dan is – uh, and Tommy is going to be – really soon, but, no. I’m not.”

“Oh,” Lovett nods. “Huh.” He tilts his head. “Oh,” he says, again.

They look at each other, and Lovett’s face is – carefully, totally blank.

Jon feels, for the first time, a little angry. He shakes his head. “So – you, you knew? And you – what? You were never going to say anything, is that it? We were just going to what – fucking – pretend for, for –”

“ _I_ knew?” Lovett’s voice is incredulous, and he actually springs up off the bed. “I knew? I didn’t – I don’t know shit, Jon, clearly –”

“ – a decade,” Jon says hotly, eyes screwed up. “Just pretending, just fuck – just wasting time, literally throwing years and years away –.” He’s pacing in a circle, unable to stop himself, while Lovett stands there, chest jumping shallowly.

“I - _I_ have never been anything but totally fucking honest about who I am,” he says, tightly, “about what I want -"

“Right,” Jon says, “Totally fucking honest, that’s you.”

“Are you – are you serious? You knew, from day fucking one, that I suck dick –"

“Yeah,” Jon says, quietly, “and you knew, or at least suspected, for a very long time, that I was in love with you.” Lovett sucks in a breath. “Am. That I am in love with you.”

“Fuck you,” Lovett says, looking at him, eyes traveling all over. “Fuck you,” he says again, and takes three steps forward until he can get his hands around Jon’s shoulders and pull him down to kiss him.

Jon kisses back automatically, immediately, without thought, cupping Lovett’s face and trying to categorize, to memorize everything: the softness of Lovett’s lips against his own, how he smells faintly of beer and bar and underneath that, just him; how when he tilts his head Jon can feel his lashes brush against his own.

He parts his lips, thinking that if this is his only kiss, he wants it to be – everything, all the steps of kissing all at once, and Lovett likes that, he guesses, because he makes a small, happy, feverish sound and lets Jon push his tongue inside his mouth, lets Jon steer him up against the closest wall and press against him like kissing him is the only thing he ever wants to do again.

Lovett seems to melt, softening in Jon’s arms. Jon kisses his chin, the corner of his mouth, his cheekbone. “You’re so -,” he says. He shakes his head. Lovett’s eyes are very wide and brown. Jon kisses him again, hands traveling from Lovett’s shoulders to his compact chest and rib cage, down to his hips, where he tightens his hold, not wanting to let go, but Lovett is so – so _small_ , and Jon hadn’t intended for this to happen.

He tries to step away and Lovett makes a low, dangerous sound. “No,” he says, tugging Jon back to him.

“Okay,” Jon soothes, kissing the line of his jaw, his throat where it’s a little raw and tender because he always gives himself razor burn. “Okay.”

Lovett rolls his hips forward. “I want you,” he says, sliding his hands down to cup and grope at Jon’s ass. “God,” he breathes. “I want you, Jon.”

“Okay,” Jon says, without hesitation. He only always and ever could say yes to that.

Lovett pushes him back towards the bed until his knees bump and he drops to it, and Lovett can scramble up on to his lap.

“You’re so sweet,” Jon says, nipping at his bicep, the swell of his pec through his t-shirt. “Look at you,” he says, knowing how he sounds and not able to help himself. “So fucking sweet.”

“Oh, god,” Lovett groans, rolling his hips to try and meet Jon’s. “Oh my god.”

Jon needs – he needs to get Lovett’s shirt off, he decides, blinking through the haze of lust. He pushes it up and, before he can get it over Lovett’s head, is leaning forward to suck at Lovett’s soft, pink nipples, pulling one, then the other into his mouth.

“Oh my god,” Lovett is saying, jumping like a live wire at the touch of Jon’s mouth against his chest. He’s twisting, stuck in the t-shirt, and Jon would like to help him, but he can’t, he _can’t_ stop suckling at his nipple, licking it, rolling his tongue around it long enough to help.

“You’re –,” Lovett chokes and Jon says, “Yeah,” mindlessly, and grips Lovett around the ribs so he can flip them, so he can get Lovett on his back and put his mouth back against his chest.

“You – oh fuck,” Lovett pants, straining against him, like no one’s ever touched him like this before. _Good,_ Jon thinks viciously, setting his teeth gently around the sensitive skin and flicking his tongue against the hard peak of his nipple until Lovett is keening - good. No one should – no one else should ever, not like this – not when Lovett’s making these high pitched breathy noises, squirming around like he’s not sure if he wants more or less of what Jon’s giving him.

Jon switches over to the other nipple, but not before licking the first one, leaving it wet and pink and puffy from his attention. Lovett makes a garbled sound and twitches when Jon starts up again, like he’s _already_ overstimulated and Jon – god, Jon wants him to remember this, wants him to look at himself in the mirror tomorrow and remember how he arched up towards Jon’s touch.

He tugs at the nipple between his teeth, glancing up to see Lovett panting, hot and open-mouthed, his face red and screwed up. Jon scrambles up to kiss him, and Lovett moans gratefully against it, sliding his arms along Jon’s shoulders, lifting his knees to bracket Jon’s waist.

Jon’s hips stutter forward in simulation and Lovett moans again. He pushes at Jon’s chest to get him to move back a little, so he can lean up and kiss Jon’s throat instead, so that his voice is a little muffled when he says, “I want it, I want you to –”

“What,” Jon asks, heart in his teeth, pulse in his goddamned temple. “What do you need, I can – I can – whatever you want -.” His hands are fluttering all over, trying to touch every part of Lovett that he can reach.

“Fuck me,” Lovett says, “I want you to fuck me,” he says, rolling his hips up against Jon’s in emphasis, so that Jon’s cock drags against his ass. “I want,” he twists away from Jon’s kiss, making a low, urgent sound, like it’s too much, too much. “I want your dick in me,” he says, hotly, and Jon nods against his throat.

“Of course,” he says, because of course – there’s no other answer. He pulls Lovett’s pants and underwear off while Lovett wriggles out of his shirt. Lovett’s compact and small and pale all over, and his dick is pink and poking between his thighs, and Jon’s mouth – waters.

“God, take off your fucking clothes,” Lovett says, cupping his dick a little protectively and stroking himself.

“Yeah,” Jon says, distractedly, meaning to – but he leans forward and sucks the tip of Lovett’s dick into his mouth.

“Fuck,” Lovett yelps, while Jon mouths wetly at the skin, which is soft and velvety smooth under his tongue, and god, he’s not usually so, but the taste is – making him hot, hotter, the way Lovett’s already pre-coming against his tongue.

Lovett plants his heels and starts thrusting up into Jon’s mouth, like he can’t help himself, can’t help the way his hips are rabbiting forward, the way he’s sucking in frantic breaths, and Jon wonders if maybe Lovett hasn’t had many people do this to him before.

“I’m gonna,” Lovett pants, thighs tightening against Jon’s shoulders, like he’s embarrassed about it - but Jon wants him to, wants to tell him it’s okay, that it’s good, so he sucks harder, slides his hand up along Lovett’s belly and chest, touches his jaw loosely. He moans and goes all the way down on Lovett when he feels him suck his fingers into his mouth, and that’s all it takes for Lovett to gasp and come, thighs trembling and back arching as Jon sucks him through it.

He lets Lovett recover, kneeling between his legs and touching his thighs and hips. Lovett looks – wrecked, lips shiny with spit, face flushed, chest rising and dipping with each panting breath. Jon wants to cover him with his body, doesn’t remember him seeming this tiny before but he does, he looks so small, all the bony parts of him not yet softened.

Lovett cracks an eye up at him. “Don’t just – look at me,” he says, and Jon takes that as permission to kiss his way up his body.

“Was that good,” he says, softly, against Lovett’s cheek.

“I see your praise kink hasn’t gone away with age,” Lovett points out.

Jon bites him.

“I still want you to fuck me,” Lovett says, breathlessly, and Jon’s hips stutter.

“I can do that,” he says, kissing across Lovett’s clavicle, up his throat. He can’t fucking stop, it seems like. “I can make you come again,” he says, and Lovett says, “Are you always like this – is he –,” and Jon says, “No, no, it’s just – god, you drive me crazy,” and Lovett says, “Oh,” and pulls Jon back against him, so that there’s no space between them.

They stay like that, for a moment, and then Lovett reaches over and grabs the lube off his nightstand. “You know what to do, I assume,” he says, looking uncertain.

Jon pushes back to kneel between Lovett’s legs. “Yeah,” he says, “Just. Just tell me what you like. Or don’t like.”

Lovett makes a face. “I know,” he says, like he doesn’t know. Jon kisses his knee, feels briefly murderous about anyone else who’s ever touched him.

Something flashes across Lovett’s face and he leverages up on his elbows. “Can I – I’m gonna,” he says and starts to turn over, but Jon stops him. “Is it okay, can we – like this?”

Lovett just nods, and Jon pushes a couple of pillows under his back so he can be a little propped up, so he doesn’t feel like he’s blinking up at the ceiling. There’s a small furrow between Lovett’s eyebrows, so Jon kisses him, softly. “Okay?”

“I’m – fine,” Lovett says, biting his cheek.

Jon fingers him slowly, pressing the pad of his index finger against his hole, petting him there until he feels the muscle relax under his finger, until he can slide in slick and smooth while Lovett drops his head back and closes his eyes, like it’s too much, the sheer pleasure of it. He adds a second finger, just as slowly, and when Lovett’s dick twitches against his thigh, he curls his fingers until he finds Lovett’s prostate, and then prods at it, gently but relentlessly, until Lovett is shaking with it, cock hard again, hands leaving bruises where they’re wrapped, vice-like, around Jon’s biceps.

“Get inside me,” Lovett says, and Jon has to circle a hand around the base of his dick so he doesn’t come.

“I will,” he mutters, against Lovett’s temple, “I will, I’m gonna,” he pushes forward until he’s rubbing the head of his dick against Lovett’s hole, “Condom,” he says, quickly, “Condom, and then I’m gonna fuck you so good.”

“Drawer,” Lovett bites out, even as he pushes his hips up, feeling the stutter and catch of Jon’s cock against his bare skin, until Jon has to hold his hips down while he fits the condom over his dick.

“I’m gonna,” he’s saying, soothing and mindlessly, “Gonna fuck up into you, can you, can you wait for it?”

“Fuck,” Lovett says, turning his head to the side and biting at his fist. “Put your dick inside of me, I want, put your fucking dick inside of me,” and for all that Jon took his time fingering him open, slowly and tentatively, he’s not gentle, now, not when Lovett is begging for it, hot and heady, keeping his knees spread wide and flat, tugging Jon in closer with his hands, even while he won’t look at Jon, not even when Jon gets the head of his dick tucked up inside of him and then fucks the rest of the way in, hard enough that Lovett makes a punched out sound, hands scrabbling against Jon’s shoulders, ankles locking against the small of his back.

Jon wants – he wants it to never end, has the terrible, strange thought of what it would be like if he could just walk around like this, with Lovett attached to his dick all the time. Have Lovett sit in his lap, getting gently fucked, at the office during meetings; pick him up and walk around with him bouncing on his dick, taking it all the time, loving it; making Jon fuck him whenever he wanted it. “You belong on my dick,” he says, fucking forward, feeling stupid and useless, and he didn’t mean to say that out loud, but Lovett moans at the words, his mouth a small open shape, and so Jon says it again, “You look fucking – you’re perfect taking my dick.”

Lovett scrabbles a hand down between them so he can jerk himself off, and there’s barely any space between them, but it’s like he can’t wait any longer. Jon’s been close since he started, but he has to, he has to say it –

“Lo,” he says, and Lovett makes a noise like he’s been hit. “You – you have to tell him." Lovett looks up at him, all of the sharp, hard parts of him stripped away, and he looks – terrified.

“I know,” Jon says, dropping to his elbows so he can kiss him, so he can hold his face between his hands. “I know – you have to, you have to be brave, you’re so brave, sweetheart –”

“I’m not,” Lovett chokes out, still fucking up for Jon’s dick, still taking it, and Jon’s never loved anyone more than this person, never wanted anyone more than Lovett. “I’m scared all the fucking time,” he says, like a confession.

“I know,” Jon tells him, “and in six months, you’re going to move to LA, and about a year after that, he’s going to - _I’m_ going to follow you out there,” he makes himself say, even though Lovett is shuddering against him, turning his face away, “and convince myself that it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I can’t stand not being around you.”

Lovett looks like he wants to hide his face; is rolling his shoulders up like he’s trying to get away, even as he shoves back for Jon’s cock. “Fuck you,” he says, and Jon kisses him, says, “I don’t know how to choose anyone but you, over and over” and Lovett keens and says, “Shut up, just shut up,” and so Jon does, hides his face in Lovett’s shoulder, smelling him, kissing him, sucking the soft skin of his throat until he comes in Lovett’s ass, his body a tense, silent shudder.

“Make me come again,” Lovett says, after a minute, still squirming under Jon’s body. “You said,” he pants, and Jon realizes that his eyes are wet, shiny. “You said you’d make me come again.”

“I will,” Jon says, and pulls out, shucking the condom with one hand and dropping it in the bin near Lovett’s nightstand before hauling Lovett forward into his lap again and fitting his fingers back inside of him, his other hand wrapping smoothly around his dick. “Feel good?” Lovett doesn’t say anything, just arches into it. “I – he thinks about this, all the time,” he gets out, and Lovett’s eyes squeeze shut, his palm slapping onto the bed as his hips start to work furiously.

“He’s imagined it,” he continues, even though his chest feels tight with the words, his throat scratchy, “what it would be like, to get his fingers inside of you, the noises you might make, how you might beg to be fucked, how much he’d like to do that, to f-fuck you.” Lovett throws his arm over his face, mouth dropping open as he pants. “Don’t stop,” he breathes, and Jon tells him, “He’s thought about it, you know, in the middle of meetings, what it might be like if you were to – to slide under the table and suck his dick, how much he’d want to come in your mouth and then kiss you afterwards, while he could still taste his own come on your lips,” he says, face burning, and watches as Lovett’s orgasm is wrenched from him, his cock jerking hotly in Jon’s grip, his ass sucking and clenching at Jon’s fingers.

Afterwards, Lovett doesn’t seem to want him to let go, and Jon thinks, with a pit in his stomach, of the time his Lovett had told him, offhand, after a couple of margaritas, that he doesn’t really care for post-coital cuddles.

He kisses the soft skin behind Lovett’s ear and holds on.

Lovett dozes for a while after that, and Jon feels sleepy too, but – he doesn’t want to miss anything. He hears people come in downstairs and shuffle off to their own bedrooms; the quiet tick of doors opening and closing; the occasional whisper of cars outside on the street. After a little while, Jon gets up and grabs Lovett’s bath towel off a hook on the back of the door and wipes him down with it, kissing where he touches, until Lovett looks sleepy and doe-eyed and pliant in a way that feels new and familiar all at once, somehow.

“Are you going to leave now?”

“No,” Jon says, automatic. “I mean, I don’t know when – I don’t really have any control over it.”

Lovett just blinks and nods at that, so Jon tucks in behind him and spoons him gently until his breathing has evened out again.

“What if,” Lovett says, quietly, long after Jon thought he’d fallen asleep, “he’s not like you?”

Lovett turns over so he can look at Jon, his eyes searching like they had been before, when he’d kissed Jon the first time. Jon realizes now that he’s taking in all the ways he doesn’t look like the person Lovett knows as his version of him. “You’re all – lean and dignified and grey at the temples,” Lovett says.

“You’re really stuck on that,” Jon says, and then clarifies: “In the future, too.”

Lovett rolls his eyes, but it seems mostly at himself because he says, “Typical.”

He’s quiet for a minute, and then says. “Also, you – you kiss back. So. What if he’s not like you?”

Jon looks back at him, this sweet-faced boy he met when he was still dumb and afraid all the time, and thinks of his Lovett, who has quietly, doggedly, patiently been waiting for him to get his shit together for years. He doesn’t know how he can miss a person when he’s literally in bed with him, but – here he is. So, he shrugs and says the only thing that makes sense, “Then I’ll wait for you.”

Then he blinks and shivers out of the past.

+++

He opens his eyes to the sight of sunlight streaming in through his bedroom windows. He turns over in bed – the sheets are rumpled but empty.

He flips onto his back, and wonders, with vague horror that he can’t quite accept just yet, if he missed his chance. If he blew it. He closes his eyes, trying to push down the well of panic that’s bubbling up, because he can take a sign from small, angry gods and he’s pretty sure you don’t get time-travel level opportunities twice in your lifetime – when he hears the click of nails on the hallway floor, followed by the soft sound of Leo jumping onto the bed.

“Hi, buddy,” he says, quietly, reaching for him, and then blinks his eyes open when he hears a second set of nails, and then footsteps. Human footsteps.

He looks up in time to see Pundit round the corner, and then – Lovett, looking sleepy and soft-eyed, wearing – Jon swallows – wearing a pair of Jon’s boxers. He drops into bed and rolls over, tucking his face into Jon’s throat. “What’re you doing up,” he mumbles, “It’s Saturday.”

Pundit and Leo curl up on the end of the bed, like they’ve been trained for a couple extra hours of a lie-in after getting their morning pee.

Jon touches the soft, warm skin of Lovett’s back. He runs his nose against Lovett’s temple, and smiles when Lovett grumbles, even as he hooks an ankle against the back of Jon’s leg and tugs him closer.

Jon smiles. “I was waiting for you,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I set out to write some angst so, naturally, ended up with one of the most romantic things I've ever put down in words AND a happy ending! Comments and con-crit are welcome and loved!


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